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Roundabout's taken more from Kuru Kuru Kururin than its central spindizzy mechanic. Both cast you as endlessly rotating sticks, in essence, trying to navigate increasingly complex mazes without wiping out on the walls. And both also seem to share a delight in physicality, a belief in being things as much as video games. Roundabout's cityscape feels more like a shove ha'penny board or a marble run than a digital playground: you can almost touch the wood, the tin, the plastic, the cardboard. It all comes down to craftsmanship. The ideas are simple, but the sheer tactile loveliness of the implementation serves to elevate everything.It helps, of course, that Kuru Kuru's spinning stick has become a spinning limousine here - the greatest Rotating Limousine in the world, in fact, driven by Georgio Manos, who gurns and grimaces through the live action cut-scenes with the stark and otherworldly chill of an old vaudeville star. The plot is genial blather, and it's a perfect fit for Roundabout's nonsensical premise. It's delivered with a kind of end-of-term prankishness as the developers call in all their game design buddies to stumble, with wonderful awkwardness, through what's presumably an in-jokey script that hands its big action moments to blurry stock footage. On paper, this sounds like a recipe for frat-boy disaster - and a similar approach was pretty disastrous in Twisted Pixel's LocoCycle. There's a human warmth here that LocoCycle missed, though: a playful acknowledgement of the narrative's ramshackle FMV nature that never quite slips into being too self-aware or smug.
Kuru Kuru isn't the only touchstone, as its discrete mazes have been replaced with a chunky open world that you loop back and forth through, picking up fares at mission markers and working ever deeper into a story that involves love, drugs and accidental homicide. It's not surprising that the whole thing should rekindle memories of the very first GTA, since that too was an overhead game inspired by the nickle-and-dime victories of the mechanical arcades. It's still a treat to return to an uncomplicated colourful city that's stocked with such simple pleasures - loot bundles to discover, shops to switch out paintjobs and limo hats, sick jumps to pull off and pedestrians to mow down in order to keep a combo stoked. There's a sense of possibility to Roundabout's toytown world that seems greater than the sum of its parts and, again, it's all so convincingly physical. Bouncing off the walls will really make you wince, while traffic cones scatter at every junction and picket fencing crumples before your front bumper.
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